The moral psychology of emulation through entangled phronesis

Whilst philosophical argument remains the gold standard
regarding what one can aspire to argue for normatively, to have
interdisciplinary credibility and potential impact in real-world
contexts, theory must be answerable to empirical evidence.
Taking heed of this maxim, this paper expounds a new neo-
Aristotelian theory of emulation qua moral role modelling by
synthesising a previous philosophical argument with insights
from current developmental moral psychology and neuroscience.
By advancing three hypotheses derived from the aforementioned
argument, I argue that emulation is a two-phase process of moral
virtue and phronesis (practical wisdom) development, where pre-phronetic
‘habituated emulation’ evolves into phronetically-informed
‘complete emulation’. Through doing so, I further
establish the centrality of phronesis to the emulative process by
refining how the psycho-moral mechanism of ‘entangled
phronesis’ drives it. Representing the aligned moral-psychological
states of role model and learner, I make clear how entangled
phronesis stimulates emulation by enabling complex normative
information to be shared and acquired through a
developmentally sensitive combination of modelled virtuous
action, verbal reason-giving and non-verbal mind reading.